Old-school rich text editors

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Two months ago I expressed my concern about the lack of a cross-platform, browser-independent rich text editor, possibly written in Flash. Marcel uncovered the Flash editor praised by Jeremy Allaire which had been removed by its author (not a good sign) and Doug from Ektron pitched their commercial product ewebWP.

None of them satisfy my quest for two reasons.

Firstly, the minor problem: none are open-source. I'm not against commercial products, but their current price schemes are unrealistic and expensive, with fees and limits at every corner: namely number of domains and named users which can become quite large within corporations. And we're stuck within software road maps with products that do not necessarily do what we want.

Secondly, the major problem: all are old-school rich text editors. While the web design world is all excited about web standards and the separation of content and presentation, the developers of rich text editors blindly continue to stuff their widgets with presentational blasphemy such as font types, sizes, colors and superbly ignore the basic concepts of style sheets and semantic elements. At best, they have replaced <b> with <strong> and <i> with <em> but that's about all you can get.

What's wrong with the idea of an open-source, cross platform, browser-independent "semantic-rich" text editor? When will developers catch up on web standards? Is that simple idea too hard to implement? It's stupor and chock here.